It's my "Cool Sites" folder from Firefox, displayed in a slightly unusual manner. Nothing more, nothing less. Check out some of the great sites. The ASCII lady is Natalie Portman. The inspiration is totally mine. The top 7 links are sites I run.

Still here? Fine. Who "are" Fatal Design? Well the question should really be "who IS Fatal Design?". The answer is me; Richard Davey. Born in England, 1975, I've been interested in gaming and computing ever since seeing Pong in action running from one of those "the box could house a small family but it only plays one game" styled consoles in the late 70's.

I'll spare you all the boring stuff, but suffice to say my age and interest was perfect timing enough for me to have been present at the beginning of the "modern" Internet. I'm not talking ARPAnet here, I'm talking being around when Yahoo ran from a Stanford EDU server, when we beta-tested Netscape 1 and when it was considered ground-breaking that Mosaic could display a jpeg.

Considering what I do today you could say this experience served me well.

Landing a job at the now swallowed-up CompuServe I learnt more about Hayes commands, baud rates, AT strings and Win3.1 dialler software than I ever cared to. But it paved the way forward. Today I am the lead Internet Developer for a UK games company.

But it's my personal interests that will most likely have drawn you here in the first place. The number one item on that list being Atari. It's a love interest that started around 1987 and has never died to this day. It's no coincidence that I run the largest Atari ST website on the Internet, or that I started and developed the largest Atari resource either. I loved the machines, the way you could be everything you wanted and do everything you wanted from one box. Graphics, music, programming, it was all there and all good fun.

ST to PC?

Being a massive ST fan I naturally wanted something on the PC that would let me explore those same heady days of "bedroom programming". There really wasn't anything short of learning C++ and diving deep into OpenGL libraries or DirectX. Until I found DarkBASIC. Then a whole new love affair began. I started re-creating old ST demo effects and moving down new 3D avenues and it was a fantastic experience. With DarkBASIC Professional things are only getting better.

But enough of all this, as usual I'm up late doing something contrary to what I'm supposed to be doing while a nice comfy bed awaits with my fiancee sleeping soundly in it. So it's time to hang-up my keyboard for the night and turn in. I had planned on writing more here but such is life, and this has been a brief snippet of mine.